Speaking of weddings, if anyone you know is in the process of planning their big day, allow me to suggest a great way they can get the wedding cake of their dreams and save a boatload of cash at the same time!

…Ever heard of renting a wedding cake?

The husband and I did, and highly recommend it!

From the time we started talking about engagement, I was planning our wedding in my head. It would be an understated, elegant event set in the winter, with simple color schemes, lots of candles and Christmas trees with twinkle lights—and a photo booth, of course. It was going to be one seriously classy affair.

When prodded, Mr. Dish didn’t have much input other than, “Sounds great, honey.” and “Whatever you like is fine by me, sweetie.” So, with his blessing, and with the help of Lynn Lucas at W.E.D, I went ahead and planned out every last detail without much consultation from him.

our wedding decor courtesy of W.E.D

The one thing he was adamant about having, however, was a wedding cake. I had always planned on some sort of sweets table in lieu of the traditional cake option, but since marriage is all about compromise, I figured it wouldn’t kill me to give him this one element of the planning process.

Traditional isn’t my bag, so we talked about doing something a little out-there, something that really spoke to the couple of 80’s-born geeks we really are, and came up with the idea of a Super Mario wedding cake. We were excited and started researching bakers who might be able to create our masterpiece for us… Unfortunately, we didn’t have $1500 to throw around.

Right around that same time, my college roommate/bridesmaid/all-around awesome friend Heidi asked if we had ever heard of CakeRental.com. She had come across the idea on a local news segment; I had never heard of such a thing, but immediately began looking up the information on the company.

As it turns out, renting a wedding cake is not as dubious as it sounds. You simply choose from a large collection of pre-designed cakes (or submit a design of your own for creation), pay a small deposit, and FunCakes Rental sends your fondant-covered Styrofoam wedding cake to you in specially-designed shipping containers just in time for your big day.

FunCakes Rental is the brainchild of Kimberly Aya, and is headquartered in Grandville, Michigan. Kim has been trained in Europe, and is a constant student of new and exciting cake decorating techniques. She can honestly drop names like Colette Peters and Duff Goldman, and her designs have been seen on The Today Show and featured in huge box office hits like “The Hangover”.

FunCakes Rental wedding cake design featured in "The Hangover"

Clearly, Kim was our cake-budget savior; what we didn’t realize however, was just how pleased we were going to be with her design. We had submitted a photo we found online of another couples’ Nintendo-themed wedding cake, and asked for something similar for our own big day. When the wedding week rolled around, it was finally time to see our cake. We opted for the pick-up option, rather than having the wedding cake shipped to us since we were in West Michigan for a holiday party anyway, and when she unveiled the cake, we were blown away!

She far surpassed our expectations in terms of design, but the functionality of the cake itself was an added bonus. Kim has created a design in the back of her cakes where a small section of the fondant can be lifted off, revealing an open spot in the construction just big enough for a small piece of cake, allowing the newlywed couple to have their cake-cutting moment without giving away the “fake-cake” secret! It was perfect. We bought a handful of delicious sheet cakes to be cut and served to our guests, who were fully in the dark about the actual ingredients of our Super Mario wedding cake.

The cake design was a hit, we were able to spend barely a fraction of that original $1500 bakery-design price quote, and we had a happy wedding day secure in the knowledge that we had not been seriously overcharged for flour and sugar and eggs.

We would recommend Kimberly Aya with FunCakes Rental to anyone out there planning a wedding, whether they’re on a budget or not!